Review of Blindness (2008) by Jobego2021 — 30 Jun 2021

A must-read for the COVID era. Again I saw the movie & then read the book. 10 years ago the movie was intriguing as this country was coming off its first wave of blindness (a.k.a. the 'aughts) but things were on the mend even as the economy was tanking. The book worked as an analogy of the early/mid-2000s on one level. A rueful look back, perhaps? No. Ten years later it is unfortunately much more relevant as a second wave of blindness (Political, social) had this country on the brink in a different way. Against the backdrop of the COVID epidemic the book & to a lesser extent the movie keeps getting more & more relevant by the minute. The story should be mandatory reading as "1984" was 70 years ago.

A summary of the plot; The plague initiates at an intersection when a driver is struck blind & is forced aside by angry fellow drivers. The cycle of abuser & abused starts early when the driver has his car stolen by a "good Samaritan" who in turn goes blind himself.

The blind driver is examined by a doctor who in turn goes blind himself. Meanwhile, the plague initializes in earnest. Hundreds of blind people are quarantined. As are the doctor & his wife. However, his wife only feigned blindness so as to accompany him for his protection. As the quarantined population increases, society unravels first inside the hospital & then with society at large; police & security dissipate while inside the hospital an armed man forms a posse that doles out food for sexual favors.

I will not reveal the middle or the ending except to say that a portion of the afflicted population learns to hang together.....

I will say that Mr. Saramago's method of inserting you in the story involves not giving formal names to any of the story's characters. They are referred to as "the Driver", "the Doctor", "the Armed man". This lends the effect of detachment & by extension a kind of blindness is experienced by the reader.

Minor gripes with the movie; When the initial victim regains his sight it drew an unwanted laugh from me given it's resemblance to a Folger's coffee commercial. ALSO the Doctor's wife was overplayed up as an "Angel of Mercy", with the exception of when she kills the "Armed Man". The book revealed darker thoughts inside her head. Overall Director Fernando Meirelles & scriptwriter Don McKellar did a bang-up job streamlining the book, but the man I wanted to see do this would have been Roman Polanski. Yes the guy's a bit of a creep but his films 90% of the time showed a marked empathy for the women who populated his films.